A Guardian's Reluctant Surrender — Evelina, Or, the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World

Villars answers Lady Howard from Berry Hill with dread. Her letter asks him to bless a public claim he has spent years refusing, and the only arguments he can offer will make him sound like a hermit rather than a guardian fit for the age. He tells her why the secrecy began. Hours before Lady Belmont died, he plighted his faith that the child should know no father but himself, or her acknowledged husband. He could not hand an infant, born in sorrow, to the man who had destroyed her mother. Belmont never enquired even into the girl's existence. Villars has both desired and feared to present Evelina: he disdained a refusal, and he feared an acceptance. The mother begged him not to leave a daughter in a dissipated house without a woman's guidance. When he saw how open Evelina was, he dropped a thousand plans for her birthright. He would raise her as his own, make her heiress of his small fortune, and keep her clear of vice, folly, and ambition.

He still thinks retirement safer than the gay world. He also knows he cannot reason Madame Duval into quiet. She is too ignorant for instruction, too obstinate for entreaty, and too weak for reason. He yields a reluctant acquiescence, and he wholly disapproves the lawsuit. He will not have a timid girl paraded for curiosity, sneers, and ridicule, in pursuit of wealth she does not want and vanity she does not feel. He once tried a public defence of Lady Belmont, and was refused every help. Duval, deaf to nature then, has listened to ambition now. A child against a father: he would sooner take Evelina to some remote place himself.

If there must be an approach to Belmont, let it be private. Howard should tell Duval that a lawsuit may only provoke him to cut his granddaughter off with a shilling, and that Duval's old enmity would make her interference useless. Evelina is not to appear until she is summoned. Villars will give counsel and will not act in person. He asks Lady Howard to write. He is holding a posthumous letter from the mother for the day a meeting happens. The Branghtons, he notes, want Duval's own money if the father's fortune is secured. On one point he will not move. The child is to be owned only together with her mother. Lady Howard is asked to write to Sir John. In Villars's keeping, Lady Belmont's letter waits for a meeting that has not been summoned.